Intel Sandy Bridge has media acceleration capabilities

The Sandy Bridge processor--to be announced January 5--will pack media acceleration circuitry, Stephen L. Smith, vice president and director of PC Client operations and enabling at Intel, confirmed at a Wells Fargo Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference held on November 9-10. CNET reported this capability earlier. Part of the conference--when Smith was speaking--was captured on an audio stream.

"The other cool thing is dedicated circuitry for media acceleration," Smith said, responding to a question from the audience. "All of us in our daily use, whether it's home videos or photos tend to pull things from the Internet, pull things from our own capture devices at home, bring them on to our PC, transform them into different formats...all of that will be dramatically faster if one utilizes this hardware acceleration, media acceleration that we have on Sandy Bridge," he said.